On Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:06:59 +0200, Tony Berth wrote > Just a quick (non really relevant) question. What is the best tool > to check the integrity of SATA HDs? To check if they have bad > sectors or other problems?
I like the smartmontools package, which communicates with SMART electronics on the drives. The built-in atactl(8) can also communicate with SMART, but I prefer smartmontools for two reasons: * Automatic short and long offline tests with e-mailed trouble reports are easy to set up. * The status reports are readable by humans. Smartmontools only communicates with SMART electronics, and its tests do not write sectors. If you want to write test patterns to sequences of sectors -- typically desired after sector failures in order to force the drive to assign spares -- the badblocks program included with the e2fsprogs package works very well.
